New IBM Cloud Technology Puts Analytics Into the Hands of More Decision Makers Across The Organization

-- New discovery and analytical capabilities help employees visualize, understand and act on insights to improve business outcomes --

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ORLANDO - 20 May 2014:

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is introducing new cloud-based software that puts analytics into the hands of more business users and decision makers across the organization.

The new IBM analytics software brings together task-personalized lists, dashboards, analysis, and reporting in the cloud, making it easier for employees to interact with data and understand it to do their work, collaborate with others, and make better business decisions – anywhere and anytime.

For example, a sales manager can now use a PC, smartphone or tablet to manage sales compensation-related activities while collaborating with peers, resulting in faster and more accurate payments to sales reps.

Gartner predicts that analytics will reach 50 percent of company employees by 2014, and by 2020, that figure will be 75 percent[1].This represents a tremendous opportunity for ROI and organic growth for organizations. A 10% increase in data accessibility, for instance, translates into an additional $65.7 million in net income for a typical Fortune 1000 company[2].

Organizations today are challenged to capture and make sense of data in real time, while enabling better, faster decisions and actions by more users. Today's news helps take analytics out of the IT department, making it accessible to frontline staff through visualization tools and dashboards.

At Vision 2014in Orlando, Florida, IBM’s global conference for finance, risk management, and sales compensation professionals, IBM is previewing new analytic discovery software on cloud that lets everyday business users visually interact with and apply advanced analytics to big data without needing the specialized skills of a data scientist. As a result, line of business professionals in sales, marketing, finance and other areas can get and easily interpret predictive insights from data in minutes.

“Analytics can improve almost any business process -- what products to make, what risks to take, which customers to target and how to make them stay. But to maximize impact, analytics also needs to be available to all the people making decisions, wherever they are,” said Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Business Analytics, IBM. “By offering these new solutions in the cloud, IBM is helping organizations drive stronger employee engagement and gain real-time insight into how their business is performing.”

New Software Speeds Analytic Decision-Making in the Cloud

IBM Concertis now offering new cloud-based analytics software available on IBM Cloud Marketplace that can manage the increasing volume and complexity of processes and tasks, support an increasingly mobile workforce, and emphasize social collaboration as an integral part of decision making. By accessing this technology in the cloud, business users can now easily view, understand and interact with specific performance insights to more easily determine what actions to take and when. Remote employees can also contribute and update data immediately via mobile devices, improving accuracy and providing real time planning and forecasting.

For example, a sales manager looks at the Concert dashboard and sees that sales for one product line are running behind plan for the current quarter. The manager immediately recommends an additional sales incentive for the quarter, attaches a few comments, and asks for senior management approval as part of an established process. The CFO, who is out of the office, can use a smartphone to access the expense alert, read all the comments, and review in-context metrics to approve the request.

IBM Previews Advanced Analytic Solutions

Project Catalyst Insight is a new analytic discovery solution that makes analytics more automated, approachable and accessible to business users. Catalyst Insight automatically builds predictive models and presents those results as interactive visuals with plain language descriptions. Using Catalyst Insight, a marketing manager could use advanced analytics to better understand the drivers of marketing campaign effectiveness without having to wait for a data scientist to prepare the information, develop predictive models and interpret the results.

IBM also announced plans to make its OpenPages enterprise governance risk and compliance family available as a managed service on SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. OpenPages allows businesses to develop a comprehensive compliance and risk management strategy across a variety of domains including operational risk, financial controls management, IT risk, compliance and internal audits. Using OpenPages on Cloud, for example, a compliance manager will be able to quickly identify and analyze the potential effects of a large-scale, serious incident and make recommendations for corrective action to management. This new deployment option will provide a flexible, reliable, enterprise-grade system that can grow as OpenPages expands across the enterprise.

Project Catalyst Insight and OpenPages on Cloud will join 100-plus IBM software-as-a-service offerings, IBM Cloud Suites for the C-Suite, for line of business supported by SoftLayer. SoftLayer is fast becoming the foundation of IBM's cloud portfolio, and since its acquisition in 2013, SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients.

IBM Big Data & Analytics

IBM has established the world’s deepest portfolio of Big Data and Analytics technology that spans research and development, solutions and software. IBM has invested $24 billion to build its capabilities in Big Data and Analytics, through R&D and more than 30 acquisitions. IBM has also built a strong ecosystem of partners and VCs in Big Data. Today, more than 10,000 analytics consultants, 6,000 industry solution business partners, and 4,000 IBM mathematicians and are helping clients use big data to transform their organizations.